peonage

peonage

(pē`ənĭj), system of involuntary servitude based on the indebtedness of the laborer (the peon) to his creditor. It was prevalent in Spanish America, especially in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Peru. The system arose because labor was needed to support the agricultural, industrial, mining, and public-works activities of the conquerors and settlers in the Americas. With the Spanish conquest of the West Indies, the encomiendaencomienda[Span. encomendar=to entrust], system of tributory labor established in Spanish America. Developed as a means of securing an adequate and cheap labor supply, the encomienda was first used over the conquered Moors of Spain......Click the link for more information., establishing proprietary rights over the natives, was instituted. In 1542 the New Laws of Bartolemé de Las Casas were promulgated, defining natives as free subjects of the king and prohibiting forced labor. Black slave labor and wage labor were substituted. Since the natives had no wage tradition and the amount paid was very small, the New Laws were largely ignored. To force natives to work, a system of the repartimiento [assessment] and the mita was adopted; it gave the state the right to force its citizens, upon payment of a wage, to perform work necessary for the state. In practice, this meant that the native spent about one fourth of a year in public employment, but the remaining three fourths he was free to cultivate his own fields and provide for his own needs. Abuses under the system were frequent and severe, but the repartimiento was far less harsh and coercive than the slavery of debt peonage that followed independence from Spain in 1821. Forced labor had not yet included the working of plantation crops—sugar, cacao, cochineal, and indigo; their increasing value brought greater demand for labor control, and in the 19th cent. the cultivation of other crops on a large scale required a continuous and cheap labor supply. To force natives to work, the plantations got them into debt by giving advances on wages and by requiring the purchase of necessities from company-owned stores. As the natives fell into debt and lost their own land, they were reduced to peonage and forced to work for the same employer until his debts and the debts of his ancestors were paid, a virtual impossibility. He became virtually a serf, but without the serf's customary rights. In Mexico a decree against peonage was issued in 1915, but the practice persisted. Partly to alleviate it, Lázaro Cárdenas instituted the ejidoejido[Span.,=common land], in Mexico, agricultural land expropriated from large private holdings and redistributed to communal farms. Communal ownership of land had been widely practiced by the Aztecs, but the institution was in decline before the Spanish arrived......Click the link for more information. in 1936. In that year, too, debt peonage was abolished in Guatemala. In the United States after the Civil War, peonage existed in most Southern states as it had in the Southwest after its acquisition from Mexico. Not only blacks and Mexicans but whites as well found themselves enmeshed. By 1910 court decisions had outlawed peonage, but as late as 1960 some sharecroppers in Southern states were pressured to continue working for the same master to pay off old debts or to pay taxes, which some states had levied to preserve the sharecropping system.

Bibliography

See L. B. Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain (1950); J. F. Bannon, Indian Labor in the Spanish Indies (1966).

Peonage

a form of feudal serf exploitation in which direct producers, mainly peasants, become hereditary debtors (peons) bound in servitude to a landowner or employer. Characterizing peonage as a disguised form of slavery, K. Marx noted that “by means of advances repayable in labor, which are handed down from generation to generation, not only the individual laborer, but his family, became, de facto, the property of other persons and their families” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch, 2nd ed., vol. 23, p. 179, note). Peonage arose in the Spanish colonies in America in the second half of the 16th century, becoming very common in the 17th and 18th centuries. A modified peonage system is one of the vestiges of feudalism preserved in many Latin-American countries.

The government responded to this inconsistency in information dissemination by requiring, under the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (WWTVPRA), (205) that the consular officer inform the applicant of his or her legal rights under federal immigration, labor, and employment laws, including explaining the "illegality of slavery, peonage, trafficking in persons, sexual assault, extortion, blackmail, and worker exploitation" (206) during the visa interview.

2003) (holding that incarceration for failure to comply with a judgment of forfeiture does not constitute involuntary servitude and peonage in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment), Herndon by Herndon v.

There are a couple of other statutory possibilities related to endless detention without a trial: conspiracy against rights (Title 18, Section 241), deprivation of rights under color of law (Title 18, Section 242), and peonage (Title 18, Section 1581).

If most everyone can barely afford fuel, food, shelter and to service their debts, we will have essentially returned to a utilitarian, subsistence economy based largely on debt peonage where the extraction and accumulation of huge amounts of surplus value will come to a grinding halt.

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